hi,

i need power for rendering my animations in my favorite 3d software (Poser Pro 2010). i can't afford me to purchase a xeon hardware or last core i7 every 6 months so i 'm thinking about another way :

get some many netbook (second hand or new) build with atom (with multithread) and use them in a renderfarm.

Speaking money, add a notebook in the renderfarm will be easy than buy new hardware every 4 years.

A netbook does not take many place in a room, and use low power energy.

The licence of Poser Pro allows me to do that, so why not ?

am i silly or desperate ? anyone already try it or think it or view it in real ?

what do you think about this idea ?

No offense, but that does sound stupid to me. Atom CPUs are very slow and for the price of a used netbook, you can buy a regular mid-range CPU that is many times faster.

A recent Atom CPUs scores about 0.5 in Cinebench. An AMD Phenom || X4 is easily eight times faster and costs less than a netbook - but you'd need eight netbooks to match that one Phenom.

I've only tried network rendering with Vue, but based on my experiences there I would say that you would be wasting your time - both in terms of setting it up, and in terms of render time.

I've networked a Core 2 Quad machine with a P4 3.4 GHZ machine - it was slower than just rendering on the Quad core machine alone - probably due to the extra time needed to send the render data across the network and the P4 machine still rendering its part when the other machine had finished all the other tiles.

I was recently able to network an i7 machine with the older Core 2 Quad - this made a real difference to render times.

I'm pretty sure that rendering on a bunch of Atom CPU's will be a LOT slower than on any modern CPU.  The AMD 6-core processors are a reasonable price, and there are still Intel quad-core machines available for very reasonable prices. 

Worst idea of all time. It would probably take longer by far, not faster.

I've seen used dual Xeon blade servers in the $100-200 range-this would certainly be cheaper...

Quote - I've seen used dual Xeon blade servers in the $100-200 range-this would certainly be cheaper...

Really? where, that does sound like a good way to go.

r

Quote - Really? where, that does sound like a good way to go.

surpluscomputers.com  Keep that you need to read the descripions carefully, as some of them have dual processer MBs, but only appear to include one CPU.  They do have a Rackable Systems machine that appears to have two CPUs. 

Also, make sure you can get drivers easily from the Manufacturer's website.

No afilliation, but I have bought from them over the years and been satisfied...

I'm not sure if you've tried this but:

 http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=162772&start=0&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=&sid=b947698c11526c0523904b723925a795

I've often found that my rendering problems are from settings rather than hardware. I don't know about the rest of the community, but I find that Poser has an intrisic problem with it's hardware usage, as my renders can take an extremely long time sometimes, but it will never even begin to tax my system.

I have an i7-920 and 8gb of RAM, but Poser will rarely get more than 50% usage out of it, wasting a lot of hardware power. If anyone knows a way around this please let me know, I'm sure it would help the OP as well.

You could try spending around $100 to get a nice aftermarket cooler (and thermal paste) and try overclocking your system. You will get a small improvement, for sure.

You said "I have an i7-920 and 8gb of RAM, but Poser will rarely get more than 50% usage out of it, wasting a lot of hardware power. If anyone knows a way around this please let me know, I'm sure it would help the OP as well."

I have a total of 24 cores in my main pc (2 12 core xeons) and Poser 8 and Poser Pro 2010 will run 100% cpu utilization on win7 64. What OS are you running?

Quote - You said "I have an i7-920 and 8gb of RAM, but Poser will rarely get more than 50% usage out of it, wasting a lot of hardware power. If anyone knows a way around this please let me know, I'm sure it would help the OP as well."

mine can take 100% of cpu/system usage, maybe because i render in highresolution (1080p) animation.

Quote - I have a total of 24 cores in my main pc (2 12 core xeons) and Poser 8 and Poser Pro 2010 will run 100% cpu utilization on win7 64. What OS are you running?

pretty very lucky person, shall you make this test (banchmark poser), i'd really really really like to see how much you can perform with your high-end hardware :

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2732765&page=1

by advance, thank.

"pretty very lucky person, shall you make this test (banchmark poser), i'd really really really like to see how much you can perform with your high-end hardware "

18 seconds on PoserPro 2010 12 gb ram (2) 2.67ghz 12 core xeons Win 7 64, but this "benchmark" doesn't tell much it is so unchallaging, no ray tracing or indirect light etc

a chain is as strong as its weakest link.

I fear not a good idea at all.

Get windows 7 in 64 bit, a good CPU and lots of RAM.
Then keep it all "in house" or in "the box".
A render farm is OK, but finding the right balance, and eliminating "the weakest links", can get you gray hair VERY fast.

 For Poser you want a cpu with maths co-processor for floating point calculations. I dont think a netbook fits the bill. A newer unit with say 4 cores multithreaded will give you 8 cores for rendering.

Also, netbooks generally have minimal memory, so even if you had 32 of them (max rendering threads in PP2010) you would still be limited to simple scenes, simple materials, and mediocre render settings.

Quote - Also, netbooks generally have minimal memory, so even if you had 32 of them (max rendering threads in PP2010) you would still be limited to simple scenes, simple materials, and mediocre render settings.

hummm you're right !

i didn't think about this point : the memory

netbook have 1Gb of memory.

and my current renders tasks (on my workstation ci-7) always need 3GB at least.

so yes, this was a stupid idea! arghhhhhhhhhhh!

dash it ! a column of netbook was so more handly and beatiful in a room than a real server lame or multi barebones case!!

well, i cancel my idea.

thank guys for reasonned me!

Quote - You said "I have an i7-920 and 8gb of RAM, but Poser will rarely get more than 50% usage out of it, wasting a lot of hardware power. If anyone knows a way around this please let me know, I'm sure it would help the OP as well."

 

I have a total of 24 cores in my main pc (2 12 core xeons) and Poser 8 and Poser Pro 2010 will run 100% cpu utilization on win7 64. What OS are you running?

I also have win7 64 bit, I don't know why you're able to to get all of the performance out of yours. The only bottleneck on my system, really, is my hard drive

Michael;  true, the idea doesn't pan out, but it is good to bat around new ideas, and you were wise to ask others who have a different perspective before investing money in the idea.

Render100;  have you set the number of threads in edit:general preferences:render?  For a HyperThreaded processor like the core i7, the number of threads should be twice the nominal core count, 4 threads for a H/T dual core, 8 threads for a H/T quad core, 12 threads for a H/T hex core.

Can't you increase the memory of a netbook past 1gig?

Quote - Can't you increase the memory of a netbook past 1gig?

yes you can for several models, but it is not important because it costs too much to add ram module. my aim was to use 100-150$/€ for each netbook (new or second hand).

i'm pretty sure that purchase 12 netbooks to build a (12-cores/24-threads 12GB memory @ 1.6GHz) renderfarm is less expensive than buy a full machine bi-xeon 12cores....... ...but...i forgot something very important too:

with equal frequency, 1 atom core is not as speed as 1 xeon core cpu whatever the generation/architecture (moreover there is no SSE4 instructions in atom cpu).

in fact i think 1 core of a xeon is equal to at least 4 cores atom maybe more. It means that i would need 48netbooks to equal a 12cores xeon computer and at this level money is more expensive !

Last months, i saw a new that intel release a 128 atom atom server, i'm really wandering what would be the performance in a render process...

well, i will come next year for asking the same question : can i build a renderfarm with tablet PC or smartphone.....as cpu mobile already in dual/quad core in this device ! :-)

Yeah, I wouldn't go this route either - the Atom processors are really fine for office and can cope with 2D art aps just fine but they would struggle with rendering. Their strength seems be in lowish power consumption, so even my cheapie netbook can manage just over 6 hrs use typing and watching films etc.

Having said that, I did figure that my netbook specs were actually better than the machine I started using Poser 4 on (a lot better, in fact), so I tried out Poser 5 for fun (I could try some later versions but can't be bothered). I keep it there with a selection of toon, Nursoda, and Smay figures to create quick illustrations for emails and such (a bit of fun or the family). So, they aren't a complete loss for Poser users.

Quote - > Quote - You said "I have an i7-920 and 8gb of RAM, but Poser will rarely get more than 50% usage out of it, wasting a lot of hardware power. If anyone knows a way around this please let me know, I'm sure it would help the OP as well."

 

I have a total of 24 cores in my main pc (2 12 core xeons) and Poser 8 and Poser Pro 2010 will run 100% cpu utilization on win7 64. What OS are you running?

 

I also have win7 64 bit, I don't know why you're able to to get all of the performance out of yours. The only bottleneck on my system, really, is my hard drive

I'm not sure what you are doing wrong to only get 50% utilization. I have a very fast memory and hard drive, I have seperate process set to 24, the number of cores, UAC is turned off. It will runn at 100% on all 24 cores all day. But if I wanrt to run Vue for example while rendwering, Poser will still share CPU and Cores nicely.